DEFUN 2009: Multicore Programming in Haskell Now!

Haskell is: you can take an off-the-shelf copy of GHC and write high performance parallel programs right now. This tutorial will teach you how to exploit parallelism through Haskell on your commodity multicore machine, to make your code faster. We will introduce key parallel programming models, as implemented in Haskell, including:

semi-explicit parallelism via sparks

explicit parallelism via threads and shared memory

software transactional memory

data parallelism

and look at how to build faster programs using these abstractions. We will also look at the engineering considerations when writing parallel programs, and the tools Haskell provides for debugging and reasoning about parallel programs.

This half-day tutorial will teach intermediate functional programmers with no previous parallel programming experience how to write, reason about and run parallel Haskell programs, using a range of parallel programming models. Each model will be introduced with motivating examples, and exercises to develop familarity with the model in question. By the end you should have an understanding of which parallelism abstraction to use in which circumstance, and be able to go to work writing multicore capable programs in Haskell.